District 14 Town Hall 11.3.2021 Dept of Recreation and Parks.

We had a great town hall last week with Department of Recreation and Parks team members Tim Almaguer - Chief of Community Engagement and Partnerships, Earl Johnson - our District Community Liaison, and Charles Murphy from Forestry. Great news! Forestry received additional money this year to clear it's backlog by March of 2022! Learn more by watching the video on FB here and You Tube here.

Tim started with a description of the work of the Department (a) Parks - including forestry, park maintenance and planning (b) recreation including programming in the rec centers and parks and sports leagues, and (C) facility maintenance.

Charles Murphy from Forestry announced a big win! Additional funding has been allocated to help Forestry completely eliminate the back log of 311 requests for tree removal and tree maintenance (and some stump grinding) by March of 2022! We have so many requests, I look forward to seeing the results! Their backlog is about 1.5 years long, so it will take a lot of effort - but they will get it done! We also talked about planting trees and the types of trees. There is an approved tree list here that you can use if you are planning on planting trees.

We talked about parks - the importance of parks groups and updates on Clifton and Stony Run. Clifton Park has Morgan State purchasing the property where Lake Clifton School sits and will change the landscape of the park, but this is an exciting development! We also want to close 32nd street and slow down Indian Head road - and a bike lane is coming on St. Lo Drive in the spring! Stony Run is getting a lot of work done because of the DPW projects regarding stormwater restoration. The Friends group is also going through a strategic plan. Each park in the City gets inspected three times per week. There is no ranger program but hopefully there could be soon. The Mowing contract should be good before the April growing season begins.